My particular high school does not give out plus or minus grades. Do colleges just use the grades that my high school provides, or do they use their own grading system and assign letter grades based on you percentage grade in a class?
Thanks
Unless you have a different grade reporting scale like in percentage, the school may just calculate your GPA based on your letter grades. Some schools like UMich would not even use subgrade to simplify the calculation. If you have grades in percentage, they would use their conversion chart.
I believe that most colleges will refigure your GPA. It isn’t hard to do and makes the competition fair.
I have no clue, but sure hope it is true 
My daughters highschool practices grade deflation imo.
90-92=3.5
93-96=3.75
97-100=4.0
Only 1 4.0 student in 6 years…and I see people posted 4.0 or 3.95 UW all the time. At my daughters school you would have never had to have lower than a 97 numerical average to have a 4.0.
The high school will send a school Profile. This will explain the grading system they use, and give the range of GPAs for your kid’s HS graduation class. The colleges will see her grades in the perspective the HS has placed them in.
UW (Madison) uses unweighted grades- no honors/AP/IB grade inflation. btw- son’s HS district did not weight grades nor use +/- . Schools send in their explanation as above. UW uses “academic” courses only as well, no one I know of has ever determined which courses do/do not count.
Colleges will not know the percentages you received- they will receive a copy of your HS transcript with the assigned letter grade and the school’s explanation. They will not know if you had the lowest or highest number associated with a given grade on your transcript. btw- even grades with modifiers of +/- or other distinctions are merely general ideas of how much you know/work done et al.
Do not worry about “fairness” of how schools determine grades. Colleges will get the overall picture of how well you have done and the rigor (compared to that offered) of your classes. There are good reasons admissions are not rigid with regard to just the numbers. Not all schools assign class rank (mine did not) either. It really shouldn’t/doesn’t matter who had a few points more/less than another. The students who go outside their comfort zone to explore subjects that are not their strengths may not always get the top grade but will have learned so much more.
It seems that in today’s world teachers give tests that students can get 100% on. I still remember excellent college honors chemistry where the top score was in the 80’s- one student and a few of us got A’s with scores in the high 60’s. Instead of creating an exam (blue book, essay type, show your work, partial credit) just to show limited knowledge and understanding required we stretched our abilities. It was humbling to realize that despite how much we knew there was so much we did not know. Likewise medical board exams at different levels had surprisingly low pass percentages. Very comprehensive. It is subjective whether or not a teacher gives an A for an essay based on points assigned or without them.
Our high school transcript had number grades on it. Somewhere on the cover sheet they said what was an A vs a B. I have no idea if colleges looked at that chart or not, and I don’t even remember now how they divvied up the grades, or whether there were theoretically +'s and -'s. It all seemed to work out - my kid with the unweighted 97 point something GPA (top 2% of class) got into Ivies and Ivy equivalent programs in terms of selectivity. My kid with the 93 point something GPA (top 6% of the class) got into slightly less selective colleges. (His coursework and ECs were also slightly less stellar.) I just figure that you should consider the GPA as a general range. So older kid was 3.9-4.3 depending on who was doing the figuring. Naviance was also a big help in seeing how colleges looked at the GPA ranges in our school.
Au contraire. It is extremely difficult to do. Think about it. Top college receives thousands of applications on Jan 2. They have ~10 weeks to process them all and make a decision.
Do you really think that the Admissions offices have the staff power to recalc each and every transcript? Heck no, they just read them in context. Is a 3.5 top decile or median at that specific HS? Is a 3.9 top 10, or top quintile? The answers to grade inflation is the Profile.
fwiw: the UC’s, which are public make the applicants do the work by entering each college prep HS course and grades one-by-one into the application form and then the computer does the calculation.
@bluebayou Au contraire again. many colleges will recalculate the weighted GPA based on their standards.
This question has been asked directly to the college admissions officers. Many colleges have said they recalculate the GPAs and many have said they do not. Many squint at the grades in the individual courses and the rigor and then just give you a number that is on some scale of their own - if you aren’t in the top one or two of that scale your academic chops aren’t good enough, but they aren’t parsing the difference between a 3.95 and a 3.96.
Yes, “many” do, including the UC and Cal State, which I already pointed out… Other publics will do something similar to ensure that the applicant meets minimum requirements for admission. And since publics are the vast majority of colleges, “many” is not incorrect.
But that still does not make it a simple process, particularly for a top private college…
Bingo. But ‘squinting’ is not recalculating, IMO. It’s just not realistic to expect it to happen as the common conception likes to think. Again, do the math. Stanford, for example, receives 40k applications, over both Early and Regular rounds. They have ~7 weeks to process the early apps (excluding athletic recruits). They have 10-12 weeks to process the Regular apps. How many work-study students would they need to take all of those high school transcripts and “recalculate” the GPA’s in time enough for the Adcoms to start reading the files?
“Squinting” and skimming the Profile is much more efficient and cost-effective.
Exactly.
Penn State receives something like 80K applications, and does in fact have seasonal staff devoted to doing exactly that. (recalculating gpas to equalize differences across schools)
I think comparing different high school’s grading systems and rigor has got to be difficult. Our high school has a 5.0 grading system but kids get a “6” for an A in an honors or AP class. The difference between these classes and regular classes is staggering. And, in many AP classes, an 80 percent is an A. I know that sounds like grade inflation but only about 25% of the kids in any given honor/AP class get an A. And the classes are full of kids who are very bright and will score very high on standardized tests. These classes at our high school are just plain difficult and kids just do not get 95% on tests (or labs).
I try not to worry too much since our high school sends kids to Ivies and schools like Duke, Northwestern, Stanford, etc. So, somehow, the AOs figure this out!
We asked our state flagship how they calculated grades.
We were told that they were re-calculated with extra points for honors and AP’s.
What if the HS considers all it’s courses honors? If that was the case it better be on the transcript listed as honors or no extra weight would be given.
Why is that the case if the college has the HS profile and knows its policy? Because a computer does the initial sorting of 1000’s of applications and recalculating of GPA. Unless an application is flagged in some way then an adcom may never see it. And there is the chance it gets missed even if flagged.
Our HS after talking to the university changed to adding the honor’s designation to many of their courses
I have to think that the more selective schools with significant admissions resources who see kids from the same high schools year after year must have a sense of how 3.5s or 4.0s stack up at those high schools, and even what grades in specific courses might signify.
@bluebayou it is not that hard to do. They’ve been doing it for years. They have to convert IB and 100 pt. scale scores anyway. It really is not rocket science. Many adcoms state publically they do it. Why would they lie? It’s a heck of a lot harder to read recs and essays. GPA is simple math any computer can do.
@homerdog that is, at it’s most basic, the admissions dept. job. They get many different scales and schools do their GPA different. It’s really among the least difficult of their jobs. Most competitive and state schools know the schools they’ve gotten kids from continually over the years and know how to convert/interpret those data.
I mean, if they can’t convert some simple numbers, how can they parse ECs and recs and essays?
Every selective school does its own qualitative “evaluation” or “scoring” of the strength of the HS transcript. I’ve had the opportunity a couple of times to see a demonstration of how an admissions person does this. It takes less than one minute.
None of these schools will read the transcript without also reading the HS supplied “profile” right along side, which provides information about what courses are offered by the HS and about the grade distributions in those classes. So while fewer high schools rank their students, the colleges are provided all the info they need to pretty much figure out your approximate rigor-adjusted academic class rank.
The evaluation may or may not involve an actual GPA recalculation. Bottom line, the selective colleges do this scoring many tens of thousands of times every year. They are very good at doing that and they do it very fast. It is not hard to do at all.
Typically, they are going to focus on only your core academic classes (math, science, english, foreign language, social studies). They are going to look if you are taking the harder or easier versions of those classes (honors, IB, AP) that are offered at your school. Then they will look at the grades you got in those classes on a relative basis. Meaning are your grades in the top 1/5/10/25/50% of the grades given in that class.
So it doesn’t matter exactly what your school’s grading system is. They just want to know (and can figure out easily) how strong a student you are for that HS.
Also, the HSs can figure this out too. One of my kid’s HSs for a long time prided itself on using a deflated grading system as a sign of its rigor. Eventually some colleges told them that was stupid and not helpful to their students college aspirations. Despite all the evaulation the colleges were doing, the scale was just too far out of the norm.
The HS now has a newer and more normal grading curve. For a few years, all the transcripts had explanaotry notes describing the transition from the old to new system.
Not until the student is accepted and they have to report on the CDS. If Cornell receives thousands of applications from NY residents, many of which are on a 100 point scale, why on earth would they waste their time recomputing all of those transcripts into a 4.0?
Big Red knows with certainty that it wants top decile kids and perhaps even top quintile. It’s just a lot more efficient to eyeball the app and Profile to see where the 95 falls: top 10 students, or top 20%? A quick look at the transcript to AP/IB courses (AP rigor or AP Lite?), and GC rec for ‘most rigorous’ box and this whole process takes a minute. Recalculating thousands of GPAs would take hours.
Do you really believe that they have the staffing and would spend the money to do so? If so, who performs that grunt work task? Have you or your college-aged kids ever known of a college student who had such a work study/volunteer job? Even seen it advertised on the school job board?
It just doesn’t pass the smell test.
Maybe I dragged my kids to the wrong info sessions, but not one Adcom in sessions that I sat in said that they “recalculate” GPA’s. They all did say that they review the application in context with the HS. But that is shorthand for saying they use the school Profile to establish a proxy for ranking since many high schools don’t rank, and that they don’t penalize a kid for not taking a bunch of AP’s if his/her school only offers 1 or 2; the opposite is also true – take 5 AP’s and they are all AP Lite in contrast to someone who has taken Calc BC, Euro, Lit, Chem/Physics.
Northeastern said they recalculate GPAs with their own weighting system.